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Airline Glossary – Traffic rights

What do “traffic rights” regulate, we asked you last Friday on our Facebook page. Here’s the answer:

Traffic rights regulate the type and the number of flights – passenger, cargo, mail and technical – that can be operated between and within countries.

Every airline requires an air operator’s certificate, issued by its national supervisory authority, to perform its commercial flight operations. The corresponding traffic rights are based on eight “Freedoms of the Air”, which range from the right to overfly a country to the right to stop there for technical reasons, transport passengers to or from that country, transport passengers from that country to another country or even transport passengers within that country.

These traffic rights are negotiated by the states concerned. And they may often be liberalized or dealt with more restrictively, depending on a country’s political and/or economic situation.